Carolyn Jones

Carolyn Jones

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Carolyn Jones

Carolyn Sue Jones^[1] (April 28, 1930 ? August 3, 1983) was an American actress, best remembered for playing the role of Morticia Addams in the classic TV series The Addams Family.

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Biography

Jones was born in Amarillo, Texas, the daughter of Cloe Jeanette (née Southern) and Julius Alfred Jones.^[1] She was named after actress Carole Lombard, and after moving to California, joined the Pasadena Playhouse in 1947.

Jones secured a contract with Paramount Pictures and made her first film in 1952. In 1953, she married aspiring film-maker Aaron Spelling (converting to Judaism upon marriage), and her film career began to gain momentum. She had an uncredited but memorable bit part (as a nightclub hostess) in The Big Heat, and a role in House of Wax brought her good reviews. She was cast in From Here to Eternity, but illness forced her withdrawal. Donna Reed was recast in her role and won an Oscar for her performance. Jones appeared in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Bachelor Party. In 1958, she shared a Golden Globe Award for "Most Promising Newcomer" with Sandra Dee and Diane Varsi, and appeared with Elvis Presley in King Creole, and the following year played the girlfriend of the character Tony Manetta (played by Frank Sinatra) in Frank Capra's A Hole in the Head and an actor's manager opposite Dean Martin in Career. 1959 also saw a good role for Jones in Last Train from Gun Hill, as the mistress of Craig Belden, (played by Anthony Quinn) whom she courageously betrays to help Matt Morgan (played by Kirk Douglas) capture Belden's son for the rape and murder of Morgan's Native American wife.

By 1963, she and Spelling were separated, and by 1964 they were divorced. In 1964, with a long coal black wig covering her naturally blonde hair, Jones began playing Morticia Addams in the television series The Addams Family, a role which brought her success as a comedienne and a Golden Globe Award nomination.

Her acting career began to decline after the end of The Addams Family in 1966, and while she continued to act, her roles were sporadic. While appearing in the television series Capitol in 1982, she was diagnosed with colon cancer and she played many of her scenes in a wheelchair. Jones' struggle with cancer, however, had begun far earlier. Lovely Me, the biography of best-selling pulp author Jacqueline Susann, reveals that Susann, herself battling cancer, inquired about Carolyn's condition. Susann died in 1974.

She married her voice coach, Herbert S. Greene (born 1906 in Columbia, SC), in 1968, and resided with him in Palm Springs, California. They were divorced in 1977.

Chemotherapy did little to slow the course of her cancer and she died in 1983 at her home in West Hollywood, California. She had married long-time boyfriend, actor Peter Bailey-Britton, a month earlier. Jones told her sister, Bette Moriarty, that she wanted her epitaph to be, "She gave joy to the world." Her body was entombed at Melrose Abbey Memorial Park Cemetery in Anaheim, California, beside her mother.